Fine jewellery of the eighteenth century, now almost equally sought after--watches, chatelaines, rings, and brooches--has been multiplied in quantities during recent years. As the brooches of this date are very often mounted with rose-cut diamonds, care has been taken to employ stones cut in this manner. Their settings generally distinguish the copies. Again, as M. Eudel points out, when fine old diamond-work has been sent to be reset, the jeweller preserves the old mounts, sets them with modern stones or pastes, and sells them as genuine old work. For the purpose of furthering the deception complete parures purporting to be seventeenth or eighteenth century work are offered for sale in genuine old leather or shagreen cases. A set of jewels may even be made for the special purpose of fitting such a case, or an entirely new case constructed, and treated in such a manner as to give it an appearance of age. CHAPTER XXXVII MEMENTO MORI "I will keep it, As they keep deaths' heads in rings, To cry _memento_ to me." The study of the various forms of personal ornament by means of which the memory of the dead or of death itself has been preserved by the living is one which offers a wide field for investigation. The Egyptians enforced the precept "_Memento Mori_" by introducing at their banquets a small coffin containing the image of a corpse which, according to Herodotus, was shown to each guest. In classical times skeletons were rarely represented, though one is sculptured on a tomb at Pompeii. The warning "_Memento Mori_" manifested itself in divers fashions in the Middle Ages, the most conspicuous being the famous "Dance of Death," which made its début in the fourteenth century, and was figured by Holbein in the sixteenth. Testimony of the desire of all to keep the warning constantly before the mind is borne by personal ornaments of various kinds displaying emblems of mortality. In order to arrive at the meaning of these crude emblems so often applied to objects of jewellery, regard should be paid to the feelings of the times that gave them birth. During the latter period of the Middle Ages the grim and ascetic contemplation of death caused the artists of that period to represent it as the devil, the father of sin, horned and cloven-hoofed, carrying off the sinful souls and forcing them into the mouth of hell. But when during the fifteenth century "printing excited men's imaginations, when the first discovery of the ancient classics roused their emulation and stimulated their unrest, when the Renaissance in art increased their eagerness to express their thoughts and multiplied their method of expression,"[193] and their conscience was turned to the latter end and the unseen world, then at length did death appear, no longer as the father of sin, but altered into a familiar and human personification. [193] Cook (T. A.), _The history of Rouen_, p. 293.